


manhattan doesn't suck

by inkay



Series: mcu bingo fills [1]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Ceiling Vent Clint Barton, Gen, M/M, Pining, Post-Avengers (2012), Pre-Relationship, and tbh thats always the mood in manhattan, clint just wants decent coffee and discount candy, this is just plotless fluff not gonna lie
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-29
Updated: 2018-05-29
Packaged: 2019-05-15 08:32:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,479
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14787036
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inkay/pseuds/inkay
Summary: Clint is carrying a bit of a torch, until he's not.





	manhattan doesn't suck

**Author's Note:**

> hello i haven't written in years but i joined this year's mcu bingo and from there it sort of snowballed. special thanks to spacefoxen and the winterhawk server for being so encouraging and helpful, you all are lovely!! ;v;

Clint Barton is a man on a mission.

Well. Kind of. If he wants to get technical about it, which he doesn’t because Natasha is waiting on him and it’s never a good idea to dally when she’s involved, his only real mission is to get as many gummy worms as possible with a fistful of change that a friendly robot helped him dig out of Tony Stark’s couch earlier today. So, in short, his life is ridiculous. Also, the gummy worm economy is clearly struggling because this Duane Reade is hopelessly devoid of them and there’s a lady two rows down who keeps shooting him suspicious looks from the stationery aisle, so it’s definitely time for him to stop glaring at the empty spot between Jolly Ranchers and Starburst and hightail it out of there.

Fucking Manhattan, man.

Clint trudges out of the last 24-hour pharmacy listed on JARVIS’s extremely accurate radar and wonders if it’s worth hopping the subway all the way back to Bed-Stuy for gummy worms, of all things, but quickly decides that would defeat the purpose of staying in this garbage borough in the first place. Weirdly specific cravings aren’t worth missing Nat’s long-overdue super secret spy club meeting in Tony’s vents—RSVP unnecessary, be there or be hauled into medical—and he’s actually looking forward to showing off just how comfortable the central air system of Avengers Tower really is, because the entire infrastructure had somehow managed to expand itself to fit Clint perfectly not even a day after he snuck inside. Clint is blatantly refusing to acknowledge any possibility of Tony Stark finding out that he’s taken up permanent residence in the Tower after the disastrous throwdown in NYC, counting on his frequent expressions of distaste for the inner city to give him an excellent alibi, but he knows he’s utterly done for if Nat finds out _where_ in the vents he’s currently sleeping.

Of course, since Clint’s feelings are a complete and total secret, his best friend knows all about them by the time he makes his way back to the rooftop. He considers just hiding in the little notch of the A for the rest of the night, but he knows that won’t end well on his part; JARVIS has been in permanent bitch mode ever since Clint started practicing his hacking skills on Tony’s grocery list and might actually hire a hitman to take him out. (Or tell Tony, which is honestly a lot worse considering Clint is unsure exactly how aware Tony is of the fact that he’s been crashing here.) Clint is nothing if not stubborn, but his half-baked plan to hide from Nat goes straight to shit when he spots his best friend leaning silently against the main entry vent as he hauls himself up the side of Avengers Tower. One perfectly-plucked eyebrow is steadily approaching her hairline, and that’s honestly all it takes for Clint to heave a despondent sigh and reveal his Big Secret, also known as the nest he’s constructed directly above the ceiling grate near Tony’s workshop.

“My, what a lovely nest you have,” deadpans Natasha as she settles into Clint’s precariously constructed pile of comforters, draping a particularly colorful Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles bedspread around herself and letting it settle daintily atop her shoulders. “By any chance, was your decision to roost here inspired by literally any concern for structural soundness? Or was the vantage point a matter of more importance?”

“Don’t be mean.” Clint sulks at her and cocoons himself within his pile of pilfered blankets. “The bots are nice to me, and JARVIS puts stuff through the laundry even when I piss him off. I’m fine.”

Natasha’s left eyebrow rises to meet her right one, but she says nothing, instead choosing to delicately unwrap a package of leftover Oreos and queue up Netflix on the ancient laptop Clint has sequestered in the vents. It’s a thing of beauty, really, an ancient Lenovo cobbled together from spare parts and duct tape and a hard drive that’s probably older than he is, but Clint staunchly refuses to let it go because it’s one of the first things he managed to construct himself. (And maybe savant-level knowledge of computer engineering and programming isn’t necessarily standard issue for a spy, but he’s only human and he knows what will happen to him the moment one of his arrows fails to strike true.)

Wincing, Clint shoves that particular train of thought to the back of his mind and stubbornly tucks himself into Natasha’s side, prodding the busted-up headphone she hands him deeper into his eardrum. His bow is solidly within reach and there are at least three solid points of egress from his current location, five if he’s willing to get a little busted up, and to be honest Nat can probably protect him better than he can protect himself. And okay, maybe Clint did pick this particular perch because his not-crush sings along to AC/DC sometimes and it’s kinda cute, but he’s going to claim plausible deniability until he dies and absolutely nothing is going to change his mind—not even his best friend rolling her eyes as the opening strains of “Thunderstruck” float up through the grating beneath them.

* * *

Good things aren’t meant to last.

It’s a lesson that Clint has learned the hard way over and over, but always tries never to take to heart because he’s determined to be happy even if he has to fight for it. He cradles the fragile embers of hope for something _better_ protectively in his hands and buries them deep down under his ribs, his own carefully-guarded secret behind a cocky facade and a sureness in his step that he wishes he didn’t have to fake, and waits for someone—anyone—to notice.

Then again, no one besides Natasha and the AI who specifically watches out for intruders has noticed yet that he’s kind of freeloading in Avengers Tower, but hey. Tony technically did offer everyone a place to crash. It’s just that Clint never actually _left._ Which, well. It sounds bad even in his head, so he curls up a little tighter in the purple blanket Nat draped over him before she disappeared to go do Nat things and pretends to be asleep so that JARVIS won't threaten to monitor his vitals again. (JARVIS is apparently very used to bullying people into taking proper care of themselves. Between him and Nat, Clint almost feels at home here. The thought is terrifying.)

A small cleaning bot speeds past Clint in a frenzy, jarring him badly enough that all his thoughts immediately dissipate in favor of his fight-or-flight response. The cleaning bots of the Tower operate like a pack of overenthusiastic puppies and would usually be all over the archer living smack-dab in the middle of the central aircon if not for the fact that JARVIS is awesome and regularly diverts them from the paths Clint frequents, so the fact that one is so close to his nest is actually super worrisome. He shakes the blanket from his shoulders and sweeps his makeshift bed aside with one foot, backing up silently until he locates his bow while bracing to run like hell from whatever managed to spook a _robot._

The grating underneath him groans ominously. Clint glares at it. It promptly gives out underneath his feet, and Clint releases some extremely choice words about the integrity of metal alloys as he twists in midair in an attempt to land properly.

He never gets the chance.

“I gotta say, people usually fall _for_ me, not _on_ me,” says Tony Stark from underneath him, and honestly, that sentence alone is definitely a solid _fuck_ on the scale of one to ten specifically created for Hawkeye-induced disasters.

Clint struggles off the floor, intending to flee the room with whatever scraps of his dignity are left, but Tony grabs his arm midway through his attempted egress. “No, seriously, this is quite the turn of events. Something I was working on escaped into the vents, so I sent the cleaning bots to provoke it because JARVIS can’t say ‘I told you so’ if he’s using all his processing power to control a herd of glorified Roombas—”

“I told you so, sir,” intones JARVIS from the ceiling, sounding almost as exhausted as Clint feels.

 _“_ — _Anyway,_ that idea was sort of working until I got a face full of mysterious hot ceiling inhabitant. Also I might not actually know where the bots or the thing-with-a-capital-T I was working on went, but that’s cool, JARVIS probably does. By the way, please don’t break any more of my workshop, it’s doing its best,” Tony says all in one breath, earnestly, and he’s still kind of maybe too close and holding Clint’s wrist and calling him _hot_ so Clint has sort of lost all hope that he’s going to escape unscathed because he has a reputation for doing stupid shit under pressure. And honestly, being face to face with Tony is a lot of pressure even if you’re _not_ harboring a Thing for him because being a spy gives you insight into things you wouldn’t normally notice about people, especially regarding how much they attempt to take care of others and how little they actually bother to take care of themselves, and quite suddenly Clint realizes _exactly_ what type of weapon has gone rogue.

“You knew I was here,” blurts Clint, and Tony rolls his eyes.

“Hello, I _live_ here? Of course I knew. Purple socks kept turning up in my laundry, and _someone_ covered me with a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles blanket and hauled me onto a couch after I went on a seventy-hour engineering bender. As awesome as he is, JARVIS doesn’t have arms, even though I keep offering—”

“Sir, with all due respect, you asked me if I desired Iron Man gauntlets so you could, and I quote, ‘stop having to look for a camera to high-five every time I do something awesome.’ I refused on the grounds that high-fiving a fully functional gauntlet complete with operational repulsors would most likely render your hand unusable for the remainder of your life, upon which you replied ‘do it for the Vine’ and started constructing a set anyway.”

“Really, JARVIS, go on, keep exposing me like this, that’s _exactly_ the type of impression I want to leave,” snipes Tony, crossing his arms, and Clint tries really hard not to snicker. “Oh, that’s great, laugh it up, Barton, at least _you_ didn’t have to deal with him when he was bitching about someone hacking his grocery list—”

“That was me, actually,” Clint says sheepishly. “I wanted Oreos, and my coding was getting rusty, and I actually apologised for that one, okay, I left a note and everything—”

“Yeah, it was attached to my bedroom door with an _arrow_ and it was literally just the words ‘my b’ written on a Post-It in glittery purple pen, that was not even _remotely_ subtle—”

One of the cleaning bots plummets out of the ceiling with the mangled remains of a prototype arrow in its grasp and crashes directly onto the floor between them. Clint winces on its behalf, but the tiny bot relinquishes its found item without too much trouble and maneuvers itself into a semi-upright position before wobbling off drunkenly, servos whirring all the while.

“Okay, yeah, this isn’t exactly subtle either,” admits Tony, looking at the arrow on the ground and coloring slightly. “Wanna forget the past hour happened?”

Clint looks at the hole in the ceiling, the floundering cleaning bot being worriedly examined by what looks like an arm on wheels, the discarded bits of metal and fletchling and a spare gauntlet scattered on the table behind him, and then back at Tony’s expression (resigned, vaguely embarrassed and teetering right on the edge of hopeful, and haven’t they been doing this dance a little too long?)

“Not really.”

“What,” says Tony, looking absolutely flabbergasted, and Clint hastens to clarify.

“Sure, this night is a mess and a robot is dying over in the corner and you have a huge hole in the ceiling of your workshop, but, uh. I haven’t been able to find gummy worms or good coffee in this hell city for two weeks but I stayed here just ‘cause you’re here so I think that means I actually like you. As a person. An extremely attractive person. Also sometimes my best friend comes here for Internet and if I forgot the password it would be a problem.”

Tony stares at him some more. “You think I’m attractive.”

 _“You_ think _I’m_ attractive.” Clint scowls at him, feeling an awful lot like a third grader. “Also, you called someone who lives in your ceiling hot, so you’re officially banned from having opinions.”

“Really,” drawls Tony, raising an eyebrow. “That’s too bad, because my opinion is that we are both running on too little sleep for this and there’s a bed upstairs big enough for two. The sheets are all purple, mind you, but we’ve been having a small mishap with the laundry lately. Hope you don’t mind.”

“Huh, that’s a shame,” says Clint, and the grin on his face is quite by accident because he’s always been good at hiding his feelings but his traitorous heart is doing double time and putting everything on the line. “Purple, even though it’s my favorite color, is _absolutely_ going to be the dealbreaker here. Though I could be swayed by some coffee, and maybe breakfast in the morning…”

“Oh, that’s cute, you think I haven’t started taking actual caffeine pills yet.” Tony grins back, pushing himself off the table and leaning closer. “Here’s a secret for you. My daily brew is a combination of high-quality Starbucks and sludge from the Hudson River. You’re gonna love it. J, lock down the lab for me, if any more of the sonic arrows get loose do me a favor and don’t send any more bots that are integral to the Tower’s functionality to chase them down, that was a dumb idea, I’ll fix it in the morning—”

“Sleep. And coffee. Maybe not in that order.” Clint yawns widely and tangles his fingers with Tony’s, which is a thing he’s pretty sure he’s allowed to do now. The adrenaline of the night is starting to wear off, and the shitty deli brew he’d downed hours ago is not doing anything to help the complete exhaustion left in its wake.

“Right, okay, that’s,” says Tony, and he sounds fond but also kind of strangled. “If we’re putting all our cards on the table, I’m actually part cephalopod when it comes to holding hands, snuggling, that type of thing, I get clingy, so if that’s a problem you might want to back out now—”

“Tony?”

“Hm?”

“Shhh,” says Clint, and leans in.

**Author's Note:**

> fill: confession
> 
> 2012 was a simpler time. infinity war made me sad


End file.
